It may not have the glamour of designing a sports car, but there is plenty of
mileage in creating the perfect van, finds Farah Alkhalisi.

Aspiring vehicle designers studying at the Royal College of Art, London, don't just sit around drawing supercars: they have been working on a competitive three-month project with a team from Citroën to create visions for the urban delivery van of the future.

"One of the great things about developing a commercial vehicle is that it's associated with a functionality, a bigger picture," said Andrew Cowell, Citroën's senior design manager, and the first-year postgraduate students – a diverse bunch spanning 14 nationalities – certainly took this into account; the 26 projects presented this week showed in-depth research into the delivery process, specific user needs and wider issues such as safety, noise pollution, sustainability and urban congestion.

Such concepts may not appear with your Ocado order just yet, but they're a fascinating illustration of the thinking of the next generation of vehicle designers.

Ibbett's gold medal-winning concept, Equippe, tackles the labour-intensive nature of collecting and delivering goods for online shoppers; it involves a team of networked, automated electric scooters for fetching and stacking items in a warehouse and for short-distance local deliveries. These follow a larger electric vehicle in a platoon much as ducklings follow their mother in a line, but can peel off from the convoy or join another. They then lower into themselves to "nest" when not in use.

"I wanted to keep it cute and friendly," says Ibbett, a 24-year-old British graduate from Coventry University.

"This was a very professionally-done project," said Cowell. "He took the brief, he looked at the whole system, looked one step outside and pushed the boundaries a little bit. He's a guy to keep an eye on."

Second-placed Alexander Brink, a Finn, came up with a narrow three-wheeler combining the attributes of a basic van with a delivery scooter. The length of a Smart Fortwo, the scooter pivots around its spherical front wheel for a super-tight turning circle; it puts the driver in an upright position at the rear, with a cargo box at the front that can be removed for pre-packing or for the fitment of a Euro-pallet. It's "a product you could see happening in the future", according to Cowell.

Third prize went to South Korean Hoe-Young Hwang for his luxury-goods delivery vehicle, intended to "make the delivery a special event" and to get the neighbours curtain-twitching with envy. Hwang considered the Korean custom of wrapping presents in cloth – nicer than cardboard boxes – and the sensation of plucking an apple: recipients of deliveries will be able to "pick" their digitally-illuminated cloth bundles, containing jewellery or other high-value items, from the van. "I wanted to give a bit of analogue touch," he says.

Gaining special mentions were Vera Jiyeong Park, whose van has side panels of smart thermal-sensing "petals" which open and close for ventilation; Henri Peugeot, whose aptly-titled Silence vehicle incorporates acoustic materials used on stealth fighter jets, an anecoic (echo-free) chamber and phase-shifting sound-cancelling technology to solve the noise problems of night deliveries; Jed Sheahan, whose sink-flat concept can be a walk-through camper van or pop-up café; Francesco Binaggia, whose narrow emergency service vehicle slots in the gap between a motorbike and a full-scale ambulance; Selim Benhabib, whose iPick is an automated post office/vending machine/delivery unit on wheels circulating a neighbourhood; Inkook Jung, for a soft-centred vehicle into which delivery staff can quite literally throw packages; and Ji-Won Yun, for his tall van with rotating overhead storage cylinders.

"What's been fantastic is to see the variety of projects, the depth of the work and the quality of the work done," said Professor Dale Harrow, Dean of the School of Design at the RCA and Head of Programme, Vehicle Design. "Commercial vehicle design is often neglected but can be exciting."

Cowell, whose recent projects have included the Nemo and Bipper vans, as well as the futuristic looking DS5 car, adds that designers have to be versatile. "We don't have any specific van designers as such," he says. "It's a global design team depending on who's available and what the market is."

"For me, it doesn't really change if I'm designing a 60,000-euro sedan or a van," adds Taubert, whose CV includes the Tubik concept (2011), a re-imagining of the classic Citroën H-Van. "As designers, our purpose is always to make it look as good as possible, it's the same goal. We put the same effort in, the same clay modelling, the same number of people working on the project. The budget doesn't affect that process."

The RCA's two-year Vehicle Design Master of Arts is one of the best-regarded courses in the automotive design world, boasting a 95 per cent success rate for its graduates in motor industry employment. Its alumni include Ian Callum, Gerry McGovern, Marek Reichman, Peter Schreyer, Peter Stevens and Peter Horbury, and some of car design's biggest names – such as Ford's J Mays – drop in to give lectures or run workshops. Students are encouraged to work with engineers, businesspeople, transport researchers and more in an inter-disciplinary approach, explains Prof. Harrow.

All this is particularly necessary because this next generation of vehicle designers "will come out into a very different world", says Cowell. "The industry will evolve quite a lot. They have got a fantastic opportunity."